So we should have sided with the Allies in 1942? That’s nonsense
My interest in the topic has stretched back over 40 years since 1968 when I wrote a seminar paper on wartime relations between the United States and Ireland while at university in Texas.
Prof Geoffrey Roberts of the UCC history department was on the programme trotting out the old fatuous argument that Ireland could and should have done much more for the Allies during the war.
He could understand people wishing to remain neutral in 1939 and 1940 but he argued that there was little justification for neutrality after the start of 1942 when it was safe for Ireland to participate in the conflict.
“The bottom line is that the Allied victory in the war protected Irish democracy and Irish national independence,” he argued, “and the question is to what extent should Ireland have contributed to that cause which was its own cause.” Ireland “did a fair bit” for the Allies, “but it could have done much more,” he insisted.
“In the latter part of the war it could have opened up the country to Allied naval and air bases,” Prof Roberts continued.
“At least 5,000 Allied seamen lost their lives as a result of those bases not being readily available.”
That figure was purely notional, but one could ask how many Irish people would have died if Ireland got into the war. The country was essentially defenceless. The Germans could have bombed any Irish city from 20 feet.
It should have been so much easier for the British to defend Belfast because of its location, yet 745 people died there in one night’s bombing in April 1941. Much was made of the bombing of Coventry in which 554 people were killed, but what happened in Belfast was played down.
It has been fashionable in the Tim Pat Coogan school of Irish history to ridicule just about everything that Eamon de Valera ever did. I disagree profoundly with the part the Long Fellow played in the lead-up to the civil war, but he did many fine things.
None was finer than the magnificent way he kept Ireland out of the war and at the same time provided the Allies not only with all the help he could give, but also essentially with all the help the Allies actually desired. His role was, however, malignly discredited by an axis of distortion headed by David Gray, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.
“At the very least,” Prof Roberts argued, de Valera “could have chucked the Axis diplomats out of Ireland.” In the heat of the war people were fooled, but there is no excuse for an historian to be fooled now.
Prof Roberts basically argued that Ireland could have helped in two distinct ways, by providing bases and expelling the German diplomats.
In April 1941 de Valera discussed the issue of the bases with Australian prime minister Robert Menzies, who reported that standing in front of a map the Long Fellow could not “understand why naval bases in Ireland should be of the slightest importance to Great Britain.”
Before the war the British had renounced their treaty rights to Irish bases. With bases in England and France, the Admiralty concluded that Irish bases were unnecessary. After the fall of France, shipping going by the south of Ireland was too vulnerable to attack from German aircraft based in France, so all Atlantic shipping was routed around Northern Ireland, where the British had bases.
Churchill had advocated seizing Irish bases early in the war, but he backed off because of the political damage de Valera could do in the US with the help of Irish-Americans. Fearing de Valera might seek to disrupt any post-war peace settlement that did not end partition, David Gray, the US Minister to Ireland, personally persuaded Roosevelt and Churchill to discredit de Valera politically in American eyes in 1943.
The plan was to ask for Irish bases not because they desired them, but to get de Valera’s refusal on record. The American and British military chiefs objected, however, because they feared de Valera might comply and they argued that Irish bases would only be a liability.
After that scheme was blocked, Gray suggested they ask de Valera to expel the German legation as a supposed espionage danger to Allied plans to invade the continent. At the insistence of de Valera the German legation had already surrendered its radio transmitter. Its only means of communication with Berlin was via cable to Berne, Switzerland. As this cable passed through London, the British could cut it off at will.
The British were reading all German messages to Berlin since 1942 and MI5 warned that expelling the German diplomats could actually endanger security because the Germans might replace the legation with an effective spy. Thus the American note demanding the expulsion of the Axis diplomats had nothing to do with security. It was strictly a ploy in which security was actually sacrificed for political expediency. Gray carried the security scam a step further at the end of April 1945 when he asked de Valera to allow the Americans to seize the German legation in order to get their hands on German codes in case U-boats continued to wage war in the Atlantic. The Allies already had the codes, so that was utter nonsense. The whole thing was just another ploy.
Gray, who was fully informed about the secret Irish cooperation, was effectively telling de Valera this was the least Ireland could do, as the war was virtually over and it had provided no help so far. De Valera terminated the interview, telling Gray he would get his answer in due course. Within hours news broke of the death of Hitler, and de Valera made his extraordinary condolence visit to the German minister next day.
TWO weeks earlier, following the death of President Franklin D Roosevelt, Gray wrote to Roosevelt’s widow that “Mr de Valera made a very moving tribute to the President in the Dáil this morning and moved adjournment till tomorrow. I thought I knew this country and its people, but this was something new. There was a great deal of genuine feeling.”
In the circumstances de Valera felt it would have been an “unpardonable discourtesy to the German nation and to Dr Hempel himself” not to proffer official condolence to the German minister. Throughout the war it had been patently obvious that the Dublin government had favoured the Allies. Hempel could have caused real problems, but he never tried to do so.
“During the whole of the war,” de Valera wrote to Robert Brennan, the Irish minister in Washington, “Dr Hempel’s conduct was irreproachable. He was always and invariably correct — in marked contrast with Gray. I certainly was not going to add to his humiliation in the hour of defeat.”
His condolence to Hempel was not an expression of regret at the death of Hitler, but a personal gesture of appreciation to Hempel in the hour of defeat. It was understandable, but it was a serious political mistake because it reinforced the misconception that de Valera had in some ways been sympathetic to the Nazis.
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